Community engagement in New Deal for Communities programme yields fewer outcomes than might have been anticipated
Planning Theory and Practice on the outcomes to community engagement in urban regeneration schemes
Urban regeneration schemes tend to be based on engaging and empowering local residents. A Sheffield Hallam University study has found that even where community engagement is central to a regeneration programme, many key outcomes do not change.
Writing in this issue of Planning Theory and Practice (13.4), Paul Lawless and Sarah Pearson, in their article Outcomes from community engagement in urban regeneration: evidence from England's New Deal for Communities Programme, explore the scale and outcomes of community engagement in one long-running English regeneration programme. The New Deal for Communities (NDC) Programme ran from 1998 to 2010, providing additional investment to help change 39 deprived urban areas and the lives of their inhabitants. One central feature of the NDC Programme was its commitment to engaging local residents in helping to devise and implement ten year strategies. In order to trace change across these areas, intensive household based surveys were carried out in all 39 locations every two years. As part of that exercise residents were asked to indicate their views in relation to a range of community indicators such as ' feeling part of the community', having 'trust' in a range of local organisations, and thinking one 'can influence decisions that affect the local area'. Despite the scale of the activity, virtually all community indicators either showed no change and/or no change compared with other deprived areas.
According to the authors of this study the main reason why change was apparently limited was that only about 15% of local people participated in their local NDC Partnership. Participation was difficult to sustain, according to the Deputy Chief Executive, of New East Manchester NDC:
'I think the height of community engagement in East Manchester was years 3, 4 and 5,... around the time we were making big differences to people's lives. I think it's incredibly difficult…to sustain that… people move out of the area…. fall out with us or each other, decide that they're not interested any more or that they've got a life after all'.
A larger proportion of local people attended events and festivals organised by NDCs; but this scale of activity amongst residents in local organisations did not engender trust that they could influence decisions affecting the area.
'Regeneration schemes have consistently tried to engage local residents,' says Paul Lawless, 'Probably no English regeneration scheme has ever placed so much emphasis on the community dimension as did the NDC Programme. But in general not a great deal of thought was given to what engagement meant and how logically engaging more residents could plausibly lead to changes in themes such as trust and friendliness. Other non-community indicators did change positively: there was for instance a considerable rise in those thinking their local NDC had improved the area and its physical environment. But if any future regeneration scheme in either England or elsewhere is intent on pursuing community engagement, there are real lessons from this Programme. In particular it is critical to establish at the outset what community engagement means, and to be realistic about what can be achieved. All the evidence showed that residents in these 39 areas wanted to know what was happening in the locality -but few wanted to get heavily involved: they had other priorities.’
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Planning Theory & Practice Journal
Planning Theory & Practice provides an international focus for the development of theory and practice in spatial planning and a forum to promote the policy dimensions of space and place. Published four times a year in conjunction with the Royal Town Planning Institute, London, it publishes original articles and review papers from both academics and practitioners with the aim of encouraging more effective, two-way communication between theory and practice. The Editors invite robustly researched papers which raise issues at the leading edge of planning theory and practice, and welcome papers on controversial subjects. Contributors in the early stages of their academic careers are encouraged, as are rejoinders to items previously published. Authors are requested to draw out the wider significance of their particular contribution and to write in a clear style, accessible to a broad, international audience.
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